Author Interview: Frank Cottrell Boyce talks about writing a sequel to Ian Fleming's childrens story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang :: Interviews :: MI6 :: James Bond 007 Author Frank Cottrell Boyce answers questions about penning a modern-day follow up to Ian Fleming's children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang... Author Interview 10th April 2012 The original book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car, published in 1964 with illustrations by John Burningham, was based on bedtime stories Ian Fleming (James Bond's creator) told to his son, Caspar. Now the first-ever follow-up to Ian Fleming’s only children’s story has made a splash in the UK and USA. Fueled by wry humor, this much-anticipated sequel to Fleming’s beloved classic — featuring a contemporary family and a camper van with a mind of its own — is driven by best-selling, award-winning author Frank Cottrell Boyce and revved up by Joe Berger’s black-and-white illustrations. What was it like to take on such a well-known and beloved story? Did you have any reservations about resurrecting a classic, or was it full-throttle enthusiasm to dive in?

If someone said that you could take their fabulous 23-liter vintage racing car out for a spin, wouldn’t you be nervous? But wouldn’t you also say, “Yes, please!” The members of the Tooting family are pretty eccentric, How did you come up with those characters? Are they modeled after anyone in your own family? No! I'll never write about my own family. As far as I remember, the Tooting family was just there at the side of the road when I went out for that ride. They were thumbing a lift, and I always stop for hitchhikers. Did you have to do any research on vintage automobiles or on cars in general to write this book? How did that help you to literally and figuratively bring Chitty Chitty Bang Bang back to life? Discovering that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a real car — and that it was really called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — was a great moment for me. I’ve really been able to play with the fact that some of the people in the story — such as Count Zborowski — were real people. Do you plan to turn Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again into a series?

When can we expect more adventures with the Tooting family? Yes, I’m already writing the next book. If you think I’m putting this car back in the garage yet, you’re dreaming! It’s still my turn! When writing children’s books, do you keep your own children in mind? Do you let them read some of your first drafts to get a review of how the book is going? Not normally, but on this occasion, yes. It’s because Chitty doesn’t belong to me — she belongs to everyone. So I thought it was only right to get my children to kick the tires and listen for any strange knocking sounds from the engine. They’ve been really helpful. Did you have a movie version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again in mind when you wrote the book? I’m really hoping we can make a movie out of this. It would be such a lark. Did You Know About These 10 Children’s Books by Classic Authors :: Bibliocrunch Did You Know About These 10 Children’s Books by Classic Authors Published in Publishing Tips • 18 comments Don't Miss Stories from Bibliocrunch!

Tweet Children’s literature is an integral part of modern publishing, and as it grows so does the many ideas for more interesting plot lines. Many of our classic authors, most known rather for their adult literature, have had a hand in creating some really interesting children’s books. Many of these authors offer up a fairly unique definition to one’s idea of the children’s book, and some are authors you might not expect: 1. The Crows of Pearblossom by Aldous Huxley Author of the iconic 1932 novel Brave New World , Aldous Huxley, wrote a children’s book which was released through Random House after his death. Dealing in a style fairly similar to Huxley’s usual story style, the book deals with a crow family who’s eggs keep getting eaten by the snake that lives in their tree. The crows eventually hatch a plan to kill the snake for good. With the help of an owl, they paint a rock in the style of an egg, which the snake eventually eats and dies from. The story ends with the crows rejoicing and using the snake’s carcass as a clothesline for their chicks’ diapers. 2.

The Cat and the Devil by James Joyce A children’s book written by another classic, mostly adult fiction, author, The Cat and the Devil is a children’s book written by the famous James Joyce. Famous for his adult book, Ulysses , this book also includes some great Irish Wit, mixed with French folklore. In the story, a lord makes a deal with the Devil in order to get a much-needed bridge built over the water. His deal consists of him providing the Devil with one soul upon the completion of the bridge. When the day comes, the Devil’s promised soul comes over the bridge-a tiny little cat. At first angry, the Devil quickly enjoys his new companion. This is a great children’s book with an obscure twist. 3. Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie This is a great children’s book written by the famous Salman Rushdie, author of the controversial The Satanic Versus . The magical story of a little boy who travels to a magical land in order to find the music that his father has lost. It’s unique twist exists in its allusion to the social justice problems of the current time, particularly in India.

Written for one of his sons, the book is a great children’s book that takes a unique twist to the classic children’s story. Rushdie went on to publish a great second children’s book called Luka and the Fire of Life . 4. The Widow and the Parrot by Virgina Woolf Known to be classically different in moral undertone than many of this author’s famous works, Woolf’s children’s book includes many Victorian values from its time. The story is about a widow who, after the house that she inherited from her husband’s brother burns down, adopts a parrot. The parrot turns out to be an extremely useful pet when it eventually leads the widow to a hidden treasure, allowing her to once more have money to live. This happy, and simple story though a stark contrast to Woolf’s usual tone, is a great classic read. 5. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car series by Ian Fleming This next one is known for its famous movie, but its author was known rather for his adult writing.

Ian Fleming, famous for his James Bond series, wrote this story of a magical car from the inspiration of a race car driver who in the early 1920s named his engine Chitty Chitty Bang. With this in mind, the story’s unique magical flying car idea bears a similar connection to its speedy driver 007. 6. The Book of Mean People by Toni Morrison Toni Morrison has published many children’s books, however this book is still unique in its style. Illustrated by her son Slade Morrison, who has illustrated almost all of her children’s books, this story really analyzes how children perceive meanness in the modern world. It helps children see anger and meanness in a way that is understandable to them. The book’s focus on an adult idea in a child’s world is what makes it unique. Though this book is more modern that the others mentioned so far, it deals with a classic author introducing a classic idea that has always existed in our society. 7. A Child’s Calendar by John Updike This book deal’s with a topic that is more unique within children’s literature today. A collection of short poems, A Child’s Calendar paints each month in the way that a child views the seasons.

Though cleverly simplified, this book was Updike’s first children’s book created from completely original material. Its a great, quick read for times where there is less time for the child to read, and each poem is unique and can be read individually. 8. To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays by Gertrude Stein The factor that makes this book really unique is that it is an alphabet book written in verse, with each letter connected to a name and a short story. Originally written in 1940, the book was at first considered too complex for children and was not published until seventy years later in 2011. The book’s further uniqueness comes from the illustrations of Giselle Potter, which give it a really interesting and recognizable style. 9. Mr. Bliss by J.R.R. Tolkien J.R.R. Tolkien even had a part in children’s books. Inspired by his own first vehicle, Tolkien wrote this book about a man and his car. The story originally written for his child, was not published until 1982. The character names in the book, Gaffer Gamgee and Boffin, were later used in Tolkien’s famous The Lord of the Rings .

10. The Shoe Bird by Eudora Welty A final children’s book that needs attention is The Shoe Bird by Eudora Welty. This story consists of a parrot who works in a shoe store. The parrot routinely blocks customers from buying shoes, shouting “shoes are for the birds!” whenever they go near them. The parrot continues to cause chaos within the store. From an author known for books about the South which contained some serious moral tones, this book is filled with a much more straightforward humor. Frank Cottrell Boyce: "There are a lot of similarities between Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Doctor Who." | Children's books | The Guardian Children's books Frank Cottrell Boyce: "There are a lot of similarities between Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Doctor Who." Rebooting Ian Fleming's Chitty books and writing an episode in the upcoming Doctor Who series: Frank Cottrell Boyce is in a good, busy place right now.

Patrick Sproull spoke to him at the 2014 Edinburgh international book festival Author Frank Cottrell Boyce: "I'd tell my 10-year-old self, 'You will actually go on the TARDIS one day.'" Photograph: Christopher Thomond Patrick Sproull Share on Messenger Close Frank Cottrell Boyce is in a good place. His episode of Doctor Who (to be broadcast in October 2014) was recently filmed and he's just winding down publicity for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: Over the Moon , the last in his follow-ups to the Ian Fleming classic. There are even talks of another Chitty Chitty Bang Bang film and Cottrell Boyce is keen to be a part of it ("It would be great to do the movie!"). We meet on a bitter day in Edinburgh but the weather has done nothing to dampen Cottrell Boyce's spirits. "If you read the first book," he says when I ask him if had always wanted to write a Chitty sequel, "It ends like 'that's another story'.

As a kid you think, 'I wonder what the other stories are?' But when you grow up you realise that there's no point thinking that because it belongs to someone else. It wasn't until the Flemings called that I really thought about what else you could do." What about Cottrell Boyce's most recent project – Doctor Who? "Exactly this time last year, I did my first Doctor Who phone call in the hotel over the road, when I was at the book festival. I pitched an idea to them and then I had a phone call with Steven Moffat [executive producer and lead writer of the show]. It was exactly a year ago and we shot it this week." Can he tell us anything about it? "Not really," Cottrell Boyce says. He's choosing his words carefully. "It's quite hard to talk about Doctor Who without giving away any spoilers. My episode is the second to last episode in the series so it's the backswing before the big finale so nearly everything in it is secret." He pauses. "The only thing I would say is that when I spoke to Steven last year, he said, 'Doctor Who gobbles up stories.

You give it your best film idea and it'll use it in half an hour.' That's exactly what happened." Cottrell Boyce draws similarities between his tale of a time-travelling motorcar and his tale of the Doctor's time-travelling police box. "Doctor Who has a lot in common with Chitty like the time travel, the fantastic piece of gadgetry, the sixties… they're really based in the sixties – whatever they've become, there's something very sixties about the idea of them both," he says, "Writing Doctor Who has been very like writing Chitty. And I loved writing Doctor Who." "You can throw any story at them and it'll make sense. You can go to El Dorado or the future or to the Anglo-Saxons and it'll use it for fuel." What would Cottrell Boyce would tell his 10-year-old self? "What else happens, you will actually go on the TARDIS one day." "Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Tove Jansson who wrote the Moomin books and they were the books that most influenced me," says Cottrell Boyce of his childhood hero.

"But I guess my childhood hero would have to be Doctor Who – Jon Pertwee's Doctor." I remind him of the Internet's postulation that Peter Capaldi's Doctor will be very similar to Pertwee's and he nods. "Yeah, kind of dandified and really serious." But who is his adulthood hero? Cottrell Boyce blinks. "Do you mean my writing hero or existentially?" he asks. Both, I respond. "Well, Tove Jansson still because she's got that integrity. But as a writer, one of the people I most admire is Bill Watterson, who did Calvin and Hobbes . They're just endlessly brilliant and he kept them away from merchandising." "The other person I really admire is Daniel Barenboim, who is a brilliant talent and an amazing orchestra conductor. He's used his talent in such a great way and built this orchestra that is part Palestinian, part Israeli. That idea, that you can use culture to break things down, is what I really admire." I ask Cottrell Boyce what has been the weirdest thing a fan has ever said to him.

At that morning's event, a young fan had asked: "When are you going to write a funny book?" "That was a terrible, heart-breaking question," he says, "but I've also been asked, 'What do you weigh?' The best question ever was, 'Have you ever eaten a nettle?'" A stinging nettle? "Yeah, I have no idea why she asked me that." Dare I ask what book festival this was at? "Wigan," Cottrell Boyce replies. Hm, that might explain a few things... Project MUSE - Crossing Over: Authors Who Write Both Children's and Adults' Fiction Authors Who Write Both Children's and Adults' Fiction David Galef (bio) Given the protean nature of literary genre, the question "What is a children's book?" has long been regarded as intriguing if possibly unanswerable, almost to the point of teleology: a children's book is "a book which appears on the children's list of a publisher" ( Townsend 10 ). An equally complex but perhaps more fruitful query is "What enables an author to write both children's books and adult fiction?" Is this skill a matter of authorial personality, marketing, or a serendipitous synthesis?

And what provokes the crossover? Certainly, the list of authors who have published in both genres is long and distinguished. In They Wrote for Children Too, Marilyn Fain Apseloff has catalogued over a hundred "adult" writers whose works have also included children's texts (admittedly, sometimes adapted by later writers). But in fact the number of authors famous in both genres is far more limited. What links a book like Ian Fleming's Dr. No with his Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Those who write for both children and adults tend to fall into one of three categories (not including hybrids, exceptions, and bad examples). The most common category comprises writers of adult fiction who, for one reason or another, take up children's literature in mid-career. This pattern mimics the general history of publishing: an enterprise importuned by or otherwise made aware of a new audience for its goods. Unfortunately, some modern adults' authors think that all they must do to appeal to children is write pablum versions of their regular material. Those who manage the transition gracefully may have learned something about children: sometimes the impetus for a first children's book is the author's first child.

Such authors may also have an intuitive grasp of children's psychology, in some cases an arrested adolescence of sorts. Another possibility in this category is an author who writes on themes appealing to readers of diverse ages. Roald Dahl is a good example of this type; so, for that matter, are such seeming opposites as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Fleming. But it is not an easy achievement, and each year's list of children's books are strewn with casualties, inferior works that will soon perish. Somewhat rarer is the second type, which is simply the reverse of the first: those who start out writing for children and only later begin to write for an older audience. The obvious worry, that the original genre may constrain the new mode, seems not to apply in this direction. If anything carries over, it is the emphasis on imagination, as in Madeleine L'Engle's books for adult readers. Of course, those who achieve sufficient fame in children's literature, such as Maurice Sendak, will attract adult readers for anything they have written.

But the career-arc of Russell Hoban is different; after becoming well known as both an illustrator and writer of children's books, he began to put forth adult novels of astonishing complexity and power. Perhaps accretion is in some ways easier than simplicity. The third category, what one might term polygraphy, falls somewhere in between the first two types. Though writers such as A. A. Milne, who penned nursery rhymes and box-office hits with equal facility, are hardly a common breed, there has always been a small but recognizable subset of authors who balance an array of diverse projects and have done so since the start of their careers. Louisa May Alcott and C. S. Lewis are two good examples. Their output is generally prolific, yet marked by a high degree of craft. If some critics fault polygraphic authors for lack of depth, this quality may be attributable to speed of composition, or the tendency of popular opinion to equate prolixity with shallowness. Perhaps the most useful way to illustrate this typology is to examine the career of one writer from each category.

In selecting authors for this purpose, I seek a homogeneous group, since the variables of gender, race, class, language, and era introduce complexities that, though intriguing, are beyond the scope of this essay. Accordingly, I have restricted my discussion to three twentieth-century male English-speaking authors—Dahl, Hoban, and Milne—whose texts seem to illuminate key aspects of genre crossover. Dahl provides an excellent example of a latecomer to children's books, as well as to the profession of writing itself. An ex-R.A.F. pilot whose first published work was a doctored account of his plane crash in Libya, Dahl soon produced a book of stories about pilots called Over to You (1945). The style was tight with occasional flourishes of wit, Hemingwayesque in its spareness, yet also with Ernest Hemingway's love of technical detail. In fact, Hemingway was a friend of Dahl's, though his response to Over to You was curious.

As Alan Warren recounts the incident: "Hemingway borrowed the volume: he returned it after two days, and when Dahl asked him how he'd like [sic] the stories, Hemingway, striding off along the corridor, replied: 'I didn't understand them'" (121). This kind of reader-response keeps one from defining "adult" books as those beyond children's comprehension, since they obviously confuse some adults, as well. In any event, encouraged more by Alfred A. Knopf than by Hemingway, Dahl became known as a polished short-story writer in the vein of Saki and John Collier. A typical Dahl story, such as "Skin" or "Lamb to the Slaughter," depends on a what-if premise or a twist—what happens when a man has a masterpiece tattooed on his back? suppose the murder weapon were edible?—though the writing is not gimmicky. Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss Kiss (1959) showcase the best of these gently macabre tales, with a slight fall-off in quality when Dahl tackles the risqué in Switch Bitch (1974).

And then one day, as Dahl puts it, "I didn't have a plot for a short story, and I decided to have a go at doing a children's book" ( West, Interview 63 ). As further impetus, Dahl by then had a live audience, his own children. The bedtime stories he told them formed the nucleus of James and the Giant Peach (1961). After [End Page 29] that, it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), and Dahl was off and running. Switching genres was apparently a piece of cake, to borrow the title of Dahl's first short story. And yet, if one looks more closely at the start of Dahl's writing career, some discrepancies emerge. First, as Jeremy Treglown chronicles in his recent biography of Dahl, switching genres was more an imperative than a lark: Dahl confessed that he had begun running out of short-story ideas, and in any event magazines such as The New Yorker were turning away from his brand of narrative (127). Second, Dahl had begun working on children's material well before his first published book for juveniles.

The Gremlins, a fantasy about mythical creatures who interfere with the workings of airplanes, came out in 1943 as a picture book after being bought by Disney for possible film adaptation. Third, given the nature of Dahl's short stories, strongly plotted flights of imagination with O. Henry twists, one could argue that Dahl was always writing with a child's delight in reversals. As Mark West remarks in his book-length study of Dahl: "In almost all of Dahl's fiction—whether it be intended for children or adults—authoritarian figures, social institutions, and societal norms are ridiculed or at least undermined" (x). Treglown makes a similar point about strong maternal figures, specifically Dahl's mother, Sofie (52). Dahl depended heavily on her but also seems to have rigged events in his fiction against just such types. Many of the plots suggest a desire for revenge on the powerful. In the short story "William and Mary," the wife sees her autocratic husband reduced to utter, bodiless dependency; in "Beware of the Dog," the shot-down pilot learns that he is not only crippled but imprisoned. The children's books showcase this incapacity.

In The Magic Finger (1966), for instance, the duck hunters are turned into ducks, and The Twits (1980) is full of images of immobility: "Mrs. Twit was quite helpless now. With her feet tied to the ground and her arms pulled upward by the balloons, she was unable to move" (24). As Freud notes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the next step after dependency and paralysis is the inorganic state, which is where Dahl often leaves his victims, sometimes literally. In "The Landlady," the new lodger finds out too late that his landlady practices human taxidermy. In "Georgy Porgy," a shy curate returns to the other end of life, birth. Afraid of eros due to a childhood memory of a rabbit eating her newborn baby, and guilty over the death of his own sexually aggressive mother, he envisions a return to the womb down the throat of a promiscuous female parishioner. He ends up engulfed—inside the woman, as he imagines, but really confined to a padded cell.

The figures due for comeuppance in Dahl's children's books are dealt with similarly: the wicked aunts in James and the Giant Peach are flattened, and the two odious adults in The Twits succumb to a fatal case of the shrinks. At first, Dahl doled out poetic justice: in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for example, Augustus Gloop falls into the Slough of Gluttony, and Mike Teavee becomes as tiny and limited as the figures he watches on television. Only in his later children's books, such as Matilda (1988), does Dahl settle too predictably into a back-and-forth mode of injury and vengeance. As Matilda resolves after her father insults her: "She decided that every time her father or mother was beastly to her, she would get her own back in some way or another" (29). In Dirty Beasts (1983), a pig decides to turn the tables on the farmer and eat him, an ant-eater eats an aunt, and so on. Revenge is sweet, but less so when it becomes systematic.

Yet as far back as the flying stories, as close to bare-bones realism as Dahl ever got till he wrote his autobiographical volumes Boy (1984) and Going Solo (1986), a sense of payback prevails, often taking an arguably childlike form. In "Madame Rosette," the pilots are like boys sassing the evil old witch, in this case the ugly madam of a brothel in Cairo. The sense of impishness is never far from even the utmost seriousness. In "A Piece of Cake," a pilot in a burning airplane crash imagines a telegraph system between the body and the brain: "Down here there is a great hotness. What shall we do? (Signed) Left Leg and Right Leg" (41). "Beware of the Dog," the penultimate story in the collection, is the stuff of childish paranoia, everyone around the protagonist seemingly kind but really an enemy—the fantasy brilliantly vindicated in the end. Even the salacious stories in Switch Bitch (first published in Playboy, with two expanded into the novel My Uncle Oswald) are not quite the material of adult sexuality but rely on nudges and winks.

Uncle Oswald, a grown-up Willy Wonka figure addicted to sex rather than chocolate, writes in hints and innuendoes. A typical instance occurs during a love scene in a harem, when Oswald's diary primly declares: "I wish to be excused a detailed description of the great scene that followed" ( Switch 64 ). His one earlier novel, Some Time Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948), was a failure as far as both Dahl and the public were concerned. Though billed as a full-length adult work, it relies on two elements of children's literature, both risky in the context of the realist fiction of the 1940s and '50s: allegorical fantasy and didactic preachiness. References to Fifinellas who eat snozzberries jostle warnings about the dangers of warfare. On the other hand, the same story, pared down and illustrated by animation frames from Disney Studios, made for a likeable fable as The Gremlins (see Treglown 62 ff). What are the implications for Dahl's voice or the writer behind it? As Dahl once said of himself: "It's a mistake to see me as two different people.

I'm not" ( West, "Interview" 65 ). In fact, what Dahl does best is write Dahl books, a curious middle ground that, with a little alteration in subject and tone, appeals to either adults or children. When he veers away from this mode, as in the sexually titillating My Uncle Oswald, he loses a portion of his audience. And when he writes too deliberately for children, as in The Magic Finger with its restricted lexicon, his narrative also suffers. In fact, Dahl has gone on record against what Jan Susina has termed "kiddie lit(e)," or "the dumbing down of children's literature" (v). In a polemic entitled "Let's Build a Skyscraper, But Let's Find a Good Book First," Dahl rails against books with limited vocabulary and "those horrible things that are called educational books" (2). More successful, from both a narrative and marketing point of view, was Danny the Champion of the World (1975), in which Dahl did not pare down but rather expanded on several adult stories about poaching that had appeared in Someone Like You.

In "Lucky Break—How I Became a Writer," Dahl lists seven qualities a fiction writer should have (Henry Sugar 168-69). The first is a lively imagination, but stamina, self-discipline, humor, and humility are also on the roster. In the end, the moral dimension in which Dahl places both children and adults is more complex than mere payback or turning the other cheek, since it [End Page 30] involves luck, shrewdness, and a wit that doesn't flinch from life's ugliness. Dahl's longtime illustrator Quentin Blake, with his cartoonish but apt drawings, helps to accentuate the fun in Dahl's otherwise tendentious humor. In these days of political correctness, Dahl has endured accusations of racism and sexism, as Jonathan Culley and others have chronicled. As for charges of sadism and vulgarity, however, Culley provides convincing analogies with folklore to show just what Dahl is about: the structures and methods of myth, with their occasional cruelty and excess. Hubris leads to a sickening fall; one foul deed is repaid with another.

Hamida Bosmajian has even pointed out Rabelaisian links in an essay on Dahl's excremental vision. This kind of Lévi-Straussian analysis also explains why Dahl's appeal is so broad, since the mythic dimension knows no age limit. Hoban and his circumstances seem to present an opposite case to Dahl's. Starting as a children's-book illustrator, Hoban eventually switched over to writing for children. During the 1960s, he came out with the well-known series of Frances books, most with drawings by bis wife Lillian. Their popularity is easily understandable: the books are engaging and accurate in their simple but subtle depiction of families and relationships. The occasional rhymes that Frances recites, short and with skip-a-beat meter, present a pleasant contrast to the clever extravaganzas in Dahl's fiction, and in fact eventually made up their own collection, Egg Thoughts, and Other Frances Songs (1972). The didactic but humorous messages against stubborn behavior are shown again and again through the girl-badger Frances, whether she is sticking to a diet of bread and jam or refusing to go to sleep.

The strength of these books lies not in any lampooning but in the shrewd accuracy of depiction. In Best Friends for Frances (1969), for instance, when Frances can't join a boys' baseball game, she reluctantly falls back on her little sister for company. In A Birthday for Frances (1968), Frances must deal with sibling envy at the fuss being made over her sister's birthday. Hoban's other children's books from that decade are similar. Nothing to Do (1969), for instance, opens with "'I have nothing to do,' said Walter Possum to his father" (5)—a set-up to show, by the end of the story, that necessity is the mother of invention, which staves off boredom. In The Stone Doll of Sister Brute (1968), through the cathexis of affection onto a rock and a dog, Sister Brute learns about love. Most critics see Hoban's turning point as The Mouse and His Child (1967), which is far longer than anything he had written previously, as well as more complex in theme, tone, plot, and character.

As Hoban has commented, "I didn't make any concessions for a young reader either in vocabulary or in what I was putting into it" (qtd. in Wilkie 98 ). It includes depictions of the homeless, murder, and a take-off on Samuel Beckett's drama, and it took three years to write. Still, as a story with toys and animals as characters, The Mouse and His Child was classed as a children's book. The classification reveals as much about publishing practice as about genre, which is to say that marketing strategy determines a great deal about how a book is perceived. Hoban was known as a children's-book author; hence, his market appeal was likely to be highest in that category. Also, children's books in the past decade or two have sold better on the whole than adult books. As Dahl has noted of authors: "if they hit the jackpot with just one children's book, it's an income for life" ( West, "Interview" 65 ). An additional reason is the apparent simplicity of the work's composition, though simpler does not necessarily mean easier.

On the other hand, Hoban was trying to move past his earlier work, and the marketing of The Mouse and His Child as juvenile literature cannot have pleased him much. Referring to the rigid rules of genre, Hoban remarked, "Most adult books are about clockwork dolls who copulate. Mine happens to be about clockwork mice who walk, and therefore it is a children's book" ( "Thoughts on a Shirtless Cyclist" 13-14 ). When critics at the 1973 Exeter Children Literature Conference pursued the question of classification, by now tiresome to him, he replied "that he had wanted the manuscript to be published, that Faber was interested, and if Faber had marketed tables and chairs, he would have sold it as a table or, if they preferred, as a chair" (qtd. in McMahon-Hill 41 ). Yet the problem cannot be reduced to mere marketing economics. Though The Mouse and His Child is yet another Hoban book illustrated by his wife, both lay readers and critics see it as different from his earlier efforts.

As Valerie Krips notes in her Lacanian essay "Mistaken Identity," the book's pervasive notions of lack and fantasies of wholeness are pursued on sophisticated psychological and linguistic levels (97). In any event, no one questioned the adult status of his next (unillustrated) novel, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, when it came out in 1973. During that time, Hoban's personal circumstances underwent some dramatic changes: he moved to London, his marriage broke up, his wife returned to the United States with the children, and he married again and produced a new son named Jachin Boaz. As Hoban mentions in "Thoughts on Being and Writing," he named his son after the twin pillars in Solomon's temple, Jachin and Boaz (70). The son's rage at the father in the novel, as well as the father's guilt, however, derives from Hoban's relations with his son from his first marriage (see Haffenden 128 ).

The novel has a great deal to do with the theme of fathers and sons, specifically a father who leaves his wife and son, but also with the entwined concerns of epistemology and ontology. As Jachin-Boaz tells his onomastically opposite son Boaz-Jachin, "Everyone in the world is looking for something" (12), an allegorical theme that becomes increasingly urgent in Hoban's later fiction. The Sea-Thing Child, a children's book that came out one year earlier (and was illustrated by a son from his first marriage, Abrom Hoban), has the same pattern: a character of indeterminate status who must make his way in the world. But the nature of the search is spiritual, even mystical, and, as the sea-thing child hears an eel singing, "The finding is in me, and the finding finds the way" (13). Knowing merges with being. Hoban's next novel was Kleinzeit ( 1974), whose dissection of language and social institutions might seem deconstructive were it not for the cohering mythology of Orpheus at its core.

It may also reveal the precarious mental state of Hoban at the time, checking into a hospital for diabetes complications and feeling the terror of mortality. But the arch manner in which Hoban handles the situation shows his background as an author for juveniles, from inanimate objects that talk, to comic mishearings of words. In 1974, the same year that Kleinzeit was published, Hoban put out How Tom Beat Captain Norjak and His Hired [End Page 31] Sportsmen, which went on to win a Whitbread Award. Illustrated by Quentin Blake, who later collaborated with Dahl, the book also contains repressive adult figures like those in such works as James and the Giant Peach and Matilda. For obvious reasons, How Tom Beat Captain Norjak does not participate in the complex language play of Kleinzeit, but children's fiction has other compensations, in this instance a Seuss-like indulgence in games with names like womble muck and sneedball. The mixed experiences in Kleinzeit participate in such syllabic play, but also extend further to figures of speech as they become figures of being. Apostrophe, for example, usually a one-sided trope, is answered here.

The introduction to the basic ontological dilemma in the book, "Am I real?," could be a page from one of Hoban's children's books: I exist, said the mirror.What about me? said Kleinzeit.Not my problem, said the mirror. (7) By the end, Kleinzeit has resolved this question sufficiently to go on. He has also made his peace with eventual extinction, but in a manner typical of Hoban, through a personification of death who gives a present to Kleinzeit. Abstractions are instantly turned into metaphors in Hoban's work, providing a necessary handle for young readers, but also a mythic consciousness for adult themes. As Neaera H. points out in Turtle Diary (1975): "The differences in scale and costume do not alter the event. Oedipus went to Thebes, Peter Rabbit into Mr. McGregor's garden, but the story is essentially the same" (52). Hoban may alter or even invert a traditional motif to make it more relevant to adults, however.

As the father in The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz thinks of one fairy-tale paradigm: "Always the father was dead at the beginning of the story, and the young man went out with his few coins, his crust of bread, his fiddle or his sword" (26). Though the son Boaz-Jachin does indeed go on the road with his guitar, the father has preceded him in a midlife-crisis quest, and in fact the pair are almost two halves of one man, separated in time. Turtle Diary takes a more reflective look at what may also have been two halves of Hoban's own psyche: the lonely, brooding man divorced from his family, William G.; and the burned-out children's book illustrator, Neaera H. Yet the observations throughout, as in all of Hoban's adult novels, are not only lively and inventive, but also the kind of remarks a child might make about strangers. Neaera H. remarks of her neighbor, "His eyes look as if he's pawned his real ones and is wearing paste" (10), just as William G.

comments about a fellow-lodger, "He carries a briefcase, the kind that looks as if it might be full of sausages" (29). This kind of writing, applied to an adult consciousness, mimics a child's inquisitive manner. Similarly, the Frances series, in which all the characters are anthropomorphized badgers, undergoes a sea change in Turtle Diary: Neaera H. thinks of "the John Clare poem about a badger hunted out of his den by men and dogs and taken to the town and made to fight until he was dead. There's a line in which he 'cackles, groans, and dies.' William G. looked as if he might be going to cackle" (75). The emergent tone is a blend of cackles and groans, childish amusement mixed with middle-age angst. In a Wordsworthian sense, the children's writer is father to the author for adults. In switching to an adult mode, however, Hoban also becomes less didactic and moralistic, more reliant on found symbols.

His closely observed detail, the mind's speculative ruminations, and the seamless merging of naturalism and symbolism all bespeak a modernist texture, except for the tendency toward allegory that becomes more pronounced in Riddley Walker (1980) and Pilgermann (1983). As Gillian McMahon-Hill notes of the protagonist at the end of Kleinzeit: "He has not been presented with answers, but his perception has changed" (51). The same change occurs in Turtle Diary when William H. traces a manhole cover labeled "K257" to the catalogue listing of Mozart's Credo Mass in C, which translates into "I believe" (117). (The signifying manhole cover is repeated in Hoban's children's book Ace Dragon Ltd [1980], where the etched words "Ace Dragon Ltd" refer to a dragon named Ace, of limited powers.) Added perception leads to a more meaningful existence; increased epistemology makes for a more satisfying ontology. The succès d'estime of Riddley Walker in 1980 raised all these elements to new heights, from locale to language.

Hoban's childhood exposure to fantasy and science fiction combines with Conradian pacing and a Joycean attention to language to form an apocalyptic fable of modernist complexity. But the children's writer remains visible. The narrator's language in the novel is unintentionally paronomastic, as awkward as it is clever. In fact, as Natalie Maynor and Richard F. Patteson argue, "the syntax in Riddley Walker suggests that of a child going through the necessary experimentation in mastering sentence construction" (21). Pilgermann is a further meditation on the ruinous patterns of history, against a medieval tableau of surreal violence that resembles a canvas of Hieronymus Bosch. More and more in Hoban, as Jack Branscomb comments, one sees "the need for the individual to enter into a cyclical pattern larger than himself" (31). Or, to borrow a title from Leonard Woolf, the journey not the destination matters. Hoban's most recent novel, The Medusa Frequency (1987), presents a similar message, along with the same Orphic references as in Kleinzeit, no longer on yellow paper but on a computer screen.

Both rely on the protagonist's disorientation to produce a disorienting narrative. As the hallucinatory head of Orpheus says to Herman Orff, one of Hoban's disenchanted artist-figures: "My story is not a sequence of events like knots on a string . . . all of it is happening now and any part of it contains the whole of it" (39). This is quite close to Virginia Woolf's famous pronouncement: "Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end" (150). Art can derive much of its complexity from sheer mimesis. Hoban applies this kind of insight to children's books with mixed results. The Marzipan Pig (1986), tracing the sweetness from a marzipan pig to the mouse that eats the pig to the owl that eats the mouse, and so on, presents the same casual Joycean metempsychosis that Hoban attempts in his novels, but the story remains without closure—save an abstract sense of transformation and renewal. As A.

Joan Bowers notes, Hoban's children's books have shifted from fantasy to metaphysics (94). Hoban himself confesses: "Recently my children's books and my adult novels are coming from the same place more than they used to" [End Page 32] (qtd. in Heffenden 123). Equally revealing are his affinity for Zen Buddhism ( Myers 15 ) and a statement in a 1990 address he made to a convention in San Diego: "What I want to do is come at you from several places at once" ( "Russell Hoban Reads Russell Hoban" 96 ). In his striving for meaning in a densely psychological, achronological thicket, Hoban has increasingly adopted a more allusive style, less didactic but not necessarily more attractive to children: "I'm always having to bother with editors who will say, 'Oh, could you change such and such a word for something simpler because a child won't take it in.' I just tell them to get lost" (qtd. in Wilkie 118 ).

Like Dahl, Hoban has done quite well with a few adult and children's titles, while the rest of his output is not nearly so well known. With years of successful writing behind him, he no longer feels the need to adhere to a particular fictional pattern, or even a specific bundle of bound pages: "As my thoughts get more and more interesting to me, the output of books becomes less and less pressing" (qtd. in Haffenden 123 ). At this stage in his career, Dahl was writing his memoirs. Yet Hoban seems to have moved beyond sheer versatility to the omniscient consciousness of the modernists. And in moving back and forth from children's books to adult fare, Hoban has expanded his moral dimension from social behavior to a true spiritual ethos. A writer like A. A. Milne fits into another class altogether, those for whom essays seem to come as easily as verse, or plays as effortlessly as novels. This is not to cheapen Milne's writing, no matter how copious. But for the versatile Milne, who came to the Punch round-table at age twenty-four, "shifting genres" seems questionable terminology.

From the time of his Cambridge days at Granta, Milne simply wrote, producing everything from poetry to editorial commentary in a steady stream. His earliest efforts at light verse, often written in collaboration with his older brother Ken, show a clever emulation of the contemporary Punch style, a series of witty observations in the semblance of a dialogue, a poem, or an essay. The first piece he sold freelance was a parody of the latest Sherlock Holmes for Vanity Fair. As a contributing editor to Punch, Milne provided humorous write-ups of everything from missing a wrestling match to enduring a month of fresh butter when he preferred the salted kind (see Autobiography 144ff.). This style of patter has its risk, a triviality that seems vapid rather than amusing. As the London Times once noted in a mixed tribute, "When there is nothing whatever to say, no one knows better than Mr Milne how to say it" (qtd. in McGrath 95 ). Trifling matters may suit a humorous column but fail in any prolonged treatment.

One of Milne's early plays, for example, is all about whether a man will change his name to Wurzel-Flummery in order to claim an inheritance with that proviso. The Red House Mystery (1922), with its clever amateur detective Antony Gillingham, was famously singled out in Raymond Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder" for its procedural errors. Milne's success, however, is undeniable: the one-acter Wurzel-Flummery enjoyed a double bill with a J. M. Barrie drama; The Red House Mystery saw thirteen printings in twenty years. In 1922, he had five plays running simultaneously in England and the United States, and his four children's books, published between 1924 and 1928, assured Milne an immortality at times vexing even to the author. One can attribute this popularity not to the pleasant nastiness of Dahl or to the moral complexity of Hoban but to Milne's sheer cheerfulness. No character is allowed to languish for too long; no problem is proposed without some uplifting or at least amusing solution. The possibility of bigamy in Mr.

Pim Passes By (1921) is relegated to a faulty memory; Eeyore's missing tail in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) turns out to be Owl's bell-rope. The sheer smoothness of his technique (a quality some postmodernist critics deplore) carried him through, giving his works a rosy, upturned face. Almost as important was the fit between Milne's affability and the mood of the era—with the qualification that eras inevitably change, as Milne, like so many other writers of the '20s, suffered a decline in the socialist '30s. Milne's novel Two People (1931), for instance, involves Reginald Wellard, a man of independent means with a beautiful, pleasant wife named Sylvia. Reginald bemusedly finds that he has written a bestselling novel, which causes a series of minor irritations, from having to get a haircut to dealing with an unscrupulous publisher named Mr. Pump. The novel meanders on in a Wodehousian vein (it was indeed one of P. G.

Wodehouse's favorite novels; see Thwaite 270 ), but without the narrative ingenuity. One needn't be a Marxist critic to wonder what supports such floating characters. But then, this is the sort of minor matter that Milne could spin out at great length. It is the very essence of the two Pooh books, in which the lack of a birthday present is a crisis, or the deciphering of a written sign occupies an entire episode. And there are reasons why these have become canonical children's works. As in Dahl's and Hoban's best children's narratives, there is an urgency behind the charm: bees deliver both honey and stings, overeating has dismaying consequences, and a Heffalump is the inevitable confrontation with the Other that is an emerging part of oneself. The verses in When We Were Very Young (1924), Milne's first book for children, work on the same double levels: a small child dislikes rice pudding—though the issue is over who controls whom; a king needs butter for his breakfast—why won't people comply with simple requests?

As Milne commented on the situations: When We Were Very Young is not the work of a poet becoming playful, nor of a lover of children expressing his love, nor of a prose-writer knocking together a few jingles for the little ones, it is the work of a light-verse writer taking his job seriously even though he is taking it into the nursery. (Autobiography 282) The same may be said of Ernest H. Shepard, whose illustrations stamp their images indelibly on the mind of the reader, to the point where any other vision of Kanga or Eeyore seems wrong. The impetus for the rhymes and stories seems the same as Dahl's, and perhaps Hoban's: children in the household. On the other hand, as his son Christopher has observed in The Enchanted Places, his father enjoyed "a boyhood from which all his inspiration sprang" (158). A sort of permanent adolescence, which Ann Thwaite portrays gently in her massive biography of Milne and which Charles McGrath puts bluntly in his review of it, may account for Milne's ease in stooping, if indeed it was so for Milne.

The verse "Halfway Down" perfectly captures the inertia of a child in his chosen spot, "Disobedience" the [End Page 33] protective, slightly fearful love of a son for his all-too-capable mother. There is more, of course: "Disobedience" masks Oedipal attraction, and the poem, despite its jolly tone, is about a mother who never comes back. As Martha Wolfenstein has noted, much of children's humor—and no doubt adults', as well—consists of jokes to ward off anxiety (23). The poems in Now We Are Six (1927) have a lower rate of success, to judge by which ones from each volume are still recited in various households (according to an admittedly informal poll).

In fact, certain poems in When We Were Very Young have direct counterparts in Now We Are Six, in each case to the original volume's advantage: "Jonathan Jo," about a helpful, funny, rustic type, presages the calmer portrait in "The Charcoal Burner"; the same is true of James the snail in "The Four Friends" versus Alexander the beetle in "Forgiven." This kind of contrast raises the possibility that Milne, despite his famed versatility, nonetheless appeals most to a certain-age child, beyond which children grow faintly embarrassed or bored. Small children like him and many adults dote on him, but few teenagers repair to their rooms with a volume of Milne. What is invoked here may be the innocent urge for protection, so comforting when one is young, so irritating at an older age. As Dahl once articulated his a version to When We Were Very Young: "It's that bloody nanny" (qtd. in Thwaite 266 ). Milne's output is sufficiently varied at such an early stage in his career that the question of whether he wrote for adults or children first is almost irrelevant.

In a curious way, even his novels are slightly childlike and unformed, while his children's books contain the intuitive insights into human nature that we expect from classics. The specifics are fluff, the generalities based on them true. Such are the multivalent paradoxes embodied by his polygraphy. The pantheon of writers noted for both adult and children's literature is growing yearly. Everyone seems to have a children's book that wants to be published, and well-known authors often have the audience to make these plans a reality, if not a success. Vagaries of the Zeitgeist, issues of marketing, and even the element of luck also play a part. A full-scale study of crossover failures should take these factors into account, as well as more immediate stylistic issues, since the critical field known as reader-response really depends on everything from social consciousness to aleatoric aspects, and must also explain why readers fail to respond to certain textual invitations. Causation is complex—yet this is precisely where Dahl, Hoban, and Milne are most convincing in providing reasons for why we do what we do and how we come to be ourselves.

If Roland Barthes was right in calling all the world a text, the opposite is equally true, and adults have just as pressing a need as children to understand the universe. Of course this need includes authors. In the long run, perhaps the genre-crossover from children's books to adult fiction or vice versa is defined more by need and the art that bridges such frustration as it is by casual ambidexterity. Not everyone can travel this span successfully—not everyone wants to. As Hoban has written: When we think about someone who writes fiction, I believe that we mostly think that the writer can pretty well make up whatever kind of story he likes. We are aware of course of individual limitations: writer A is best with short introspective novels; B does great epics; C excels in travel and adventure; D in the microcosm of every day. Within those limitations, we may suppose, A, B, C and D can do what they like. But of course they can't, any more than they can dream what they like when they're asleep. The dreams come from what is in the person.

Scottish children’s fiction writers — The Official Gateway to Scotland Interactives Scottish children’s fiction writers From up here, Toad could see clear over to the Firth of Forth and beyond, but his eyes settled not a stone's throw away, on Edinburgh's Castle Street. For it was here, at No. 30, that his creator was born: Kenneth Grahame who gave life to Toad, shy little Mole, clever Ratty and Badger, along with all the other characters of . "Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wild World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all . . ." (from ) The original survivor Wise words thought Toad as he remembered, with a shudder that made his eyes bulge, a compatriot of Grahame's who had been only too keen to venture into the 'Wild World' beyond. Born just over the Firth from Edinburgh, at Largo in Fife, Alexander Selkirk had run off to sea in 1703 to escape his past.

He joined the South Sea buccaneers, and no, it wasn't the end of his troubles. Many months later, having fallen out with his captain over the seaworthiness of their vessel, Selkirk demanded to be set ashore on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez (a good choice as it turns out since the ship later sank, killing most of those onboard). It would be another four-and-a-half years though before Selkirk was eventually rescued. Though embellished, Selkirk's escapades were clearly the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's and Ben Gunn, the marooned pirate from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. RLS's fellow Edinburgher, R.M. Ballantyne, played a part too. For it was his tale of three shipwrecked English boys (Ralph Rover, Jack and Peterkin), , that first sparked RLS's love of the South Seas, not to mention influencing the more recent Lord of the Flies. Another enchanting Potter Back on dry land, Toad's next port of call is Birnam in Perthshire. For it was here that Beatrix Potter spent her formative summers, well away from the confines of London.

She wrote here and met the people who inspired the loveable characters of Mrs Tiggywinkle and Jeremy Fisher. To celebrate this Scottish connection, The Birnam Institute houses a Beatrix Potter exhibition and just next door is a Beatrix Potter Garden, complete with flowers, fungi and footpaths leading to your favourite characters' haunts and hideaways. The King of Comics Swinging hard right, back to the coastline, the next stop on Toad and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's journey is the City of Discovery itself, Dundee. It was here that D.C. Thomson's was launched in 1938. And do you know what, over 60 years later, it's still the most popular comic among eleven year olds. The secret of its success: long-running favourites like 'Desperate Dan', 'Dennis the Menace', 'Gnasher', 'The Bash Street Kids', and 'Beryl the Peril', together with a constant stream of new talent. It's not just the early editions that attract a following either.

Whilst the glory days of the late 1950s may be over, when and its sister title The Dandy were both selling over two million copies a week, you can rest assured that Dennis still has a few tricks left up his sleeve. To add to the comics, the annuals, the animated series, two best-selling videos, clothing, confectionery, an established Beano book range and now two Dennis the Menace novels, the characters now appear in a computer game. 'Beanotown Racing' was developed by Dundee games company Simian Industries. Up, up and away! Speeding northwards again, our next stop is Kirriemuir in Angus, birthplace of J.M. Barrie. The son of a weaver and one of ten children, Barrie was a prolific novelist and dramatist. What he's most remembered for is his play about 'the boy who wouldn't grow up'. Taking inspiration from his own early childhood, as well as his guardianship of the five Llewelyn Davies children (The Lost Boys), Barrie created . Arguably the most famous children's play ever written, Peter Pan has been adapted for film, television and stage.

Great news for the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children to whom Barrie gave its perpetual rights. What's the story in Balamory? Hard left now and Toad is heading across country, over stunning Ben Nevis, Glencoe and Loch Linnhe, to the Inner Hebridean island of Mull. Thanks to a television series aimed at under sixes, the town of Tobermory with its brightly painted houses perched around a quiet harbour, is experiencing a mini tourism boom. Why? Because many of the 400,000 viewers who regularly tune in to see what's happening with their favourite characters in also want to visit where PC Plum, Archie the Inventor, Spencer the Painter and all the others live. An unprecedented success, the first video and DVD release from the series sold over 21,000 copies in its first week, shooting it to the top of BBC Worldwide's best-selling children's new releases chart. Moving with the times Finally returning to Edinburgh, Toad sets Chitty Chitty Bang Bang down not a mile away from where we started, right alongside another flying car, this time a blue Ford Anglia.

The Weasley's magic car sits outside a celebrated caf on Edinburgh's George IV Bridge. Inside is where JK Rowling conceived that modern-day phenomenon of children's fiction, Harry Potter. Seven books in, Harry Potter books now sell in 200 countries worldwide, translated into 60 languages, ranging from Gujarati to Ancient Greek. The world's best-known boy wizard is breaking all kinds of records. His fifth book, sold 1.78 million copies in Britain on its first day alone. The biggest selling book in e-tailing history, it's also part of the Harry Potter series of audio books which has topped the one million sales barrier - a figure unprecedented in the UK audio market. Maybe next time, instead of taking Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, we'll move with the times and use Floo Powder instead!

Question: Which author, who is most remembered for writing another series of books, wrote the children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?
Answer: Ian Fleming